Tesla’s Elon Musk Warns That Artificial Intelligence Could Destroy Humanity As We Know It

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned that humanity only has a 5 to 10 percent chance of stopping artificial intelligence from destroying life as we know it. Musk made the statement at a talk with employees at his company Neuralink, a firm that is developing technology for brain implants that will create mind-computer interfaces. If there’s anyone who would know about the dangers of AI, it’s Elon Musk.

As the Daily Mail notes, this isn’t the first time that the Tesla CEO has made this type of warning. In July, he declared that regulation of artificial intelligence/robotics is absolutely necessary as it is a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation.”

He added that AI needs regulation because advancements in the technology could cause the computers to become smarter than humans and this could have devastating consequences. For example, humans could start wars by “manipulating information,” so governments need to have a better understanding of it, he insisted.

“Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be…By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late,” Musk said at the summer conference of the National Governors Association in Rhode Island.

The SpaceX founder has also previously said that VR technology in games is becoming “indistinguishable from reality.”

“If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable,” he said at the 2016 Code Conference in California.

Despite his apparent concerns, Musk’s business interests are connected to artificial intelligence technology. As the Next Web reports, he owns a company called Open AI, an organization that describes itself as a non-profit company that’s dedicated to finding a way to create safe artificial intelligence. According to the Next Web, Open AI has recently developed an AI that is able to teach itself.

He has also invested in the creation of Neural Lace, which is Neuralink’s primary project. Neural Lace is a mesh brain implant that can observe neurological function. It’s like a cable between the human brain and a computer that can facilitate the transfer of data both ways.

So, as we said before, if Elon Musk is worried about AI, then the rest of us probably need to be concerned as well.